Charles Giancarlo is a highly regarded technology veteran with four decades of experience in the technology industry. As CEO of Pure Storage and senior executive at Cisco Systems for 15 years, Giancarlo has been named CEO Monthly Magazine’s “CEO of the Year” and ranked among Network World’s “Top 50 Most Powerful People in Networking” for four consecutive years.

In addition, under Charles’ leadership, for five years in a row, Pure Storage has been named as a Fortune Magazine’s Best Workplace in multiple categories, named a Most Loved Workplace by Newsweek, and recognized as one of the top 100 Bay Area Corporate Philanthropists by the San Francisco Business Times.

Giancarlo is currently CEO of Pure Storage, Inc. Pure Storage is the inventor and leader in enterprise flash storage systems. One of the fastest-growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure Storage enables customers to quickly adopt next-generation technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help maximize the value of their data for competitive advantage. Pure Storage today can satisfy all of an enterprise’s storage needs, from the most cost-sensitive to the highest performance, with a single, consolidated flash operating environment and a cloud operating model that requires one-tenth the space, power, cooling, and labor of traditional magnetic disk-based systems.

Prior to Pure Storage, from 2008 to 2013, Giancarlo was a Managing Director of Silver Lake Partners, the world’s largest technology investor where he was also head of value creation, managing a group of executives that work to improve the operations of the firm’s portfolio companies and management teams. At Silver Lake, Giancarlo co-led Silver Lake’s acquisition of Skype from eBay and operated as Executive Chairman of Skype during its revival and eventual sale to Microsoft. He also operated as interim CEO of Avaya.

Prior to Silver Lake, Giancarlo was second in command at Cisco Systems. Giancarlo came to Cisco in 1994 when it acquired Kalpana Networks, where Giancarlo was Chief Product Officer. Kalpana invented and marketed the world’s first Ethernet switch. Giancarlo held a succession of positions at Cisco Systems from 1994 to 2007. His last position was Executive Vice President, CTO, and Chief Development Officer of Cisco. In this role, he led all of Cisco’s product development and product management activities, including all product and market strategy. He led over 30,000 employees, including over 24,000 development engineers, representing more than half of all Cisco employees and almost $40 billion of product sales.

During his career at Cisco, Giancarlo played a leadership role in all of the company’s major customer segments, including the commercial, service provider, enterprise, and consumer businesses, and in the development and execution of Cisco’s business strategies for these important customer segments. Giancarlo was also responsible for the creation of many of Cisco’s product lines and businesses, including Ethernet switching, security, unified communications, wireless networking, digital video and TelePresence, consumer networking, and Cisco’s initial channel strategy. Additionally, Giancarlo established a process for the consistent development of new businesses within Cisco.

Giancarlo is best known for his groundbreaking work in developing new technologies and markets. He was the driving force behind the creation and success of many common technologies in use today, including Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching, Ethernet switching, network security, load balancing, Wi-Fi, voice over IP and IP telephony, network access control, and TelePresence. With TelePresence as a typical example, Giancarlo conceptualized the product, formed the engineering and marketing teams, and led the development of the product and go-to-market strategy behind its successful growth.

Giancarlo holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Brown University where he served as a trustee, an MSEE from the University of California at Berkeley where he serves on the board of advisors, and a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School. He has served on the boards of Accenture, Netflix, ServiceNow, and Avaya, and currently serves on the boards of Arista, Zscaler, and several startup companies.

John Colgrove, or Coz, is Founder and Chief Visionary Officer at Pure Storage, responsible for developing and executing Pure Storage’s global technical strategy.

Coz co-founded Pure Storage in 2009. Prior to this, he was the Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. It was there he observed the growing acceptance of solid-state storage by enterprises.

Coz was one of the founding engineers at Veritas Software, which merged with Symantec in 2005, where his 20-year career culminated as Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for the Data Center Management Group.

He was the primary architect for the hugely successful Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and Veritas File System (VxFS) and later served in various other engineering, management, and consultative roles.

Prior to Veritas, Coz worked for Amdahl Corporation where he was a key contributor to the development of the UTS mainframe UNIX operating system kernel.

He holds over 300 patents in the areas of computer system and reliable data storage design. Coz has a Bachelor of Science degree from Rutgers University.

Michael Phelps is widely regarded as one of the greatest athletes of all time. He captured 28 Olympic medals, including a record-setting 23 gold medals, and set 39 world records over the course of his distinguished career. Phelps utilized his performance bonus for winning eight gold medals in 2008 to establish the Michael Phelps Foundation, which promotes water safety, healthy living (physical and mental), and the pursuit of dreams. The Foundation’s signature program - IM – is implemented through strategic partnerships with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Special Olympics International. In 2015, Phelps courageously opened up about his own mental health challenges, becoming one of the first and most prominent athlete voices who have helped catapult the important conversation across sports and pop culture. His advocacy for water safety and mental health have earned the recognition of the American Image Awards, BBC Sports, Child Mind Institute, The Kennedy Forum, Laureus World Sports Awards, PR Week, The Ruderman Family Foundation, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration among others. In addition, Phelps served as an Executive Producer, Narrator, and featured talent in the HBO documentary The Weight of Gold, which explores the mental health challenges Olympic athletes often face. He also appeared in the IndieFlix documentary, Angst, which explores anxiety among middle school students and their families.

“My career began with what felt like a backwards step to the help desk, but it’s where I learned that technology can be a game changer for a business and Technology could be a place for me to enjoy my career.”​

Technology wasn’t Jo’s first career choice. Instead, she was destined for a sports career until injury forced her to put her sporting ambitions to one side and she took a role on an IT help desk.  It was there she learnt her trade and realised she wanted to be part of fixing the bigger problem, progressing into service management strategy roles at Diageo, Accenture and Yahoo.​

With a demonstrable record of driving successful global technology transformations, Jo went on to hold senior positions including Head of Global Service Management at Betfair and the BBC where she helped to build a world-class centralised operations team.

Jo went onto senior leadership roles as SVP Global Technology Services group and then CTO at Wood Mackenzie, Senior director of engineering at Skyscanner and is now CIO at THG.​

Jo is a people orientated leader who is passionate about leadership, Diversity & Inclusion.  She also sits on the advisory boards of the Global CIO Institute, Hottopics, Forrester and the UK IT Leaders group.​

In 2022, Jo was awarded the #1 position on the CIO 100 CIO 100 2022 - UK | CIO

Kimberly W. LaGrue heads the Office of Information Technology & Innovation for the City of New Orleans. She and her team deliver IT services and strategies to ensure equitable growth of technology services throughout city government. In 2018, she was appointed Chief Information Officer by Mayor LaToya Cantrell and assigned to lead the City’s digital equity and smart city strategies, driving the mayor’s goal to provide all residents equal access to technology.

A New Orleans native with over 25 years experience in IT operations and network telecommunications, Kimberly has spent most of her career developing technology solutions for government. She is president of the Cities Today Institute-North America, which helps city leaders across the country to prepare for a resilient future by building sustainable digital infrastructures. As a fierce advocate for local broadband development, she is personally committed to developing digital opportunities in the under-served communities of New Orleans.

Rob Lee serves as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Pure Storage, focused on global technology strategy, and identifying new innovation and market expansion opportunities for Pure.

Rob joined Pure in 2013 as part of the FlashBlade founding team and led the software architecture and development, from concept to launch, for the product which has eclipsed $1B in business.

Prior to Pure, Rob was an Architect at Oracle, where he worked on programming language runtimes for the Oracle RDBMS, as well as high-performance distributed transaction processing systems. During his 12-year tenure at Oracle, he focused on improving the performance, reliability, and programming models behind large-scale distributed systems.

Rob holds over 75 patents in the areas of distributed systems, language runtimes and storage systems.

He currently serves on the board of directors for Bay Area Underwater Explorers and Cordell Marine Sanctuary Foundation - non-profits dedicated to the exploration and conservation of Northern California underwater resources.

Rob holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lynn Lucas joined Pure Storage in December 2023 as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), leading the global marketing organization. She is responsible for creative strategies that amplify brand awareness, drive demand for the company’s technology portfolio and services, and deliver compelling customer experiences.

Lynn brings 25 years of go-to-market expertise for B2B organizations across hybrid cloud, software and infrastructure markets.

Prior to Pure, Lynn was CMO at Cohesity where she built the global marketing function and was a key leader driving scale in a hyper growth environment, while navigating a successful shift to SaaS. While there, she was selected as one of the Fearless 50 customer-led marketers of 2023. An advocate for diversity in tech, she co-led the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Council and was executive sponsor for the Women’s ERG.

Lynn’s previous roles included CMO at Veritas and Good Technology, and executive leadership positions at Cisco Systems, culminating as Vice President, Collaboration Solutions for the $5B unified communications, telepresence and Webex portfolio.

Lynn holds a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Shawn Hansen is Vice President and General Manager of FlashArray. He is responsible for business operations, product strategy, quality, delivery, and expanding market leadership of the company’s flagship product. Prior to Pure Storage, Shawn spent 10+ years building high-growth startups in various roles, including as COO at Rescale, an HPC cloud leader; and as CMO at Heap, a SaaS analytics company. He also spent 10+ years in enterprise infrastructure at Microsoft, where he helped create and build the popular Azure Synapse data warehouse service, and at Cisco Systems after its acquisition of Topspin, an RDMA networking pioneer. Shawn holds an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Humanities and Japanese Literature from Brigham Young University.

Niki Armstrong serves as the Chief Administrative and Legal Officer at Pure Storage, overseeing worldwide administrative functions, including legal, compliance, corporate governance, privacy, ESG, as well as the People function encompassing DEI, talent acquisition, and the Pure Good Foundation. Prior to this role, Niki served as General Counsel, as well as the Vice President of Global Employment Law, Ethics & Compliance, and Litigation at Pure. 

Prior to Pure, Niki’s career spanned a broad spectrum of technology companies including eBay, Cypress Semiconductor, Flextronics, Auction.com, and Nutanix. She also served as a law clerk to District Chief Judge Lee J. Romero, Jr. (ret.) of the U.S. Department of Labor and spent a number of years as an employment defense litigator at Gordon Rees Scully & Mansukhani LLP. 

Niki received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and her Juris Doctor from Loyola University.